The AI-Oriented New Era: What Are Ethereum and Vitalik Actually Strategizing?

Author: Tim Sun

Over the past one to two years, discussions around Ethereum have fallen into a strange dichotomy: on one side lies weak application adoption, stale narratives, and seemingly lackluster price performance; on the other, core researchers continue advancing work—slowly and often incomprehensible to the general public—in areas such as privacy, verification, and governance.

Only recently, with the emergence of ERC-8004 and Vitalik Buterin’s systematic exposition on the relationship between AI and Ethereum, has this long-term trajectory begun to take shape. If discussions prior to 2024 largely remained stuck in the bubble phase of using crypto to hype AI, then today, Ethereum has quietly entered the infrastructure-building stage for the AI era.

The question is not whether Ethereum can run large language models—but rather a more fundamental macro question: In an AI era characterized by extreme concentration of compute power and exponential growth in capability, what role should Ethereum play?

I. How Does Vitalik View AI? What’s Wrong with Techno-Accelerationism?

Vitalik’s assessment of—and concerns about—AI stem from the fact that current AI development is being driven by an undifferentiated form of techno-accelerationism. Its logic is simple: bigger models are better; faster progress means greater safety; leaders deserve to win everything.

Yet, in Vitalik’s view, this seemingly value-neutral tendency carries an explicit power orientation. Put plainly, under techno-accelerationism, AI development inevitably leads to ever-increasing capabilities—but also increasingly centralized control, concentrated among a few tech giants.

Especially when you invoke AI more frequently, your situation may not improve—instead, asymmetries of power may intensify. For individuals, AI lowers the cost and increases the stealth of profiling, surveillance, manipulation, and behavioral prediction. For organizations, the barriers to mass content generation, information manipulation, fraud, and narrative shaping have plummeted.

From this perspective, Vitalik believes AI may force humanity into retirement—and gradually exclude humans from decision-making and value distribution.

Hence, in his latest essay, Vitalik opens with a clear thesis: The problem with AI is not compute or model size—it is directionality. He does not oppose AI itself, but he opposes blind acceleration without constraints or calibration mechanisms. This is precisely why he seeks to bring Ethereum to the center of the AI discourse:

Not to compete in the race for raw compute—but to provide, in the AI era, a direction for technological evolution that resists absorption by entrenched power structures.

II. Why Is ERC-8004 Underappreciated? Where Lies the Value of Minimally Verifying AI?

ERC-8004 was formally proposed in August 2025, jointly advanced by the Ethereum Foundation, MetaMask AI, Google, and Coinbase, targeting mainnet launch in Q2 2026. In terms of significance, it is one of the most critical—and yet most easily underestimated—proposals for the Ethereum mainnet in recent years.

This is because ERC-8004 does not address superficial issues like “putting AI on-chain.” Instead, it tackles a far more fundamental—and even paradoxical—question: When AI begins executing economic actions autonomously, how do we use it—without trusting it?

Understanding ERC-8004 is essentially understanding how Ethereum—and Vitalik Buterin—intend to embed AI within a system that is verifiable, constrainable, and exitable. ERC-8004 rests on a key assumption: AI is *not* trustworthy—or, at minimum, must be treated as unreliable. Even under this premise, how can humans still collaborate with AI while maintaining controllable risk? By design, ERC-8004 is extremely restrained, introducing only three minimally necessary components: identity registration, reputation registration, and verification registration.

In plain terms: it gives AI a traceable identity, a visible record of behavior, and—crucially in contexts like DeFi—an authoritative, trusted evaluation.

Prior to ERC-8004, AI operated inside platforms whose rules were defined by those platforms themselves. ERC-8004 attempts to invert this: AI serves solely as an executor—not as an arbiter.

This explains why ERC-8004 deserves dedicated discussion: It is not merely a standard—it is the new central thread Vitalik has identified for Ethereum in the AI era. Ethereum is not entering the AI capability race; instead, it aims to become the trust-minimized foundational layer for AI’s economic activity. This aligns precisely with what Ethereum has done best historically—and why Vitalik repeatedly emphasizes decentralization and censorship resistance.

III. Don’t Trust, Verify: How Can Privacy Technologies Support AI?

Another direction Vitalik consistently stresses is the evolving importance of privacy technologies—especially zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs—and verification logic in the AI era.

In Vitalik’s view, the logic is straightforward: If blockchain offers only transparency, then for AI, it amounts to running naked through a dark forest with no cover whatsoever. If every AI RPC call and every cross-protocol fund transfer is publicly visible, AI strategies will be front-run instantly, and their intentions fully reverse-engineered. Without privacy, AI cannot become a genuine economic actor—and cannot sustainably operate on-chain.

Thus, Ethereum’s privacy roadmap—including Vitalik’s latest articulation—actually outlines a full suite of privacy solutions. For instance, using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to encapsulate entire RPC queries, reducing node or service provider visibility into query content; long-term, transitioning gradually toward Private Information Retrieval (PIR), achieving cryptographic guarantees that nodes cannot know what you queried;

Or ZK-based payments, avoiding identity-linkage leakage along payment paths—enabling proof of payment without exposing identity associations or behavioral traces.

Vitalik also highlights local LLM toolchains, keeping the most sensitive personal interactions and strategies on-device. And critically, client-side verification—empowering end devices to verify execution. Even if compute is invoked remotely, users can locally verify whether it followed the rules.

Putting these pieces together reveals that, in the AI era, the Ethereum Vitalik envisions is not moving toward greater transparency—but toward a higher-order stage: verifiability *without* penetrability.

In other words: leveraging cryptographic mathematical constraints to ensure AI’s outputs and rule compliance are trustworthy—while preserving necessary secrecy around its decision pathways, attention data, and funding sources.

IV. Toward a New AI Era: Where Is Ethereum Going—from “World Computer” to What?

At this point, we can answer the original macro question: What exactly is Ethereum building toward?

For the past decade, Ethereum’s core narrative has been the “world computer.” But in the AI era, this metaphor may no longer hold—and could even be misleading, since blockchains will never outperform NVIDIA GPU clusters on raw computational efficiency.

Combining ERC-8004 with Vitalik’s latest thinking, we might conclude that Ethereum is undergoing a strategic upgrade—from a computation layer to an AI-economic-and-verification layer. Amid AI’s relentless amplification of capability and power, what proves hardest to replace is not efficiency—larger data centers and smarter models will always emerge—but rather, AI verification.

Ethereum is attempting to host precisely that layer: verifying whether AI’s behavior conforms to rules; providing accountable, settleable economic structures for AI collaboration; and preserving meaningful human agency in the face of AI.

This path is inevitably slow—and inevitably unpopular. Yet, looking back over Ethereum’s more than a decade of history, it seems the network has always advanced precisely through such counter-speed persistence.

Across the broader AI wave, Silicon Valley VCs and tech titans ask: How intelligent—and how fast—can we push AI?

Ethereum and Vitalik, by contrast, seek to answer a far more dangerous—and far more important—question:

When AI becomes inevitable, how much choice will humanity retain?

This, perhaps, is what Ethereum—and Vitalik—are truly building toward.